Bartolomeo Cristofori

Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco ( May 4, 1655 – January 27, 1731) was an Italian maker of musical instruments, generally regarded as the inventor of the fortepiano. (click the Wiki button for the Piano page). Cristofori was born in Padua on this day in 1655 in what was then the Republic of Venice.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the instrument Cristofori invented was referred to during his lifetime as a harpsichord that plays soft and loud, from which its name is derived. In Italian, the phrase is gravicembalo col piano e forte.

Google doodle marks Bartolomeo Cristofori’s 360th birthdayOn the blog dedicated to its doodles, Google wrote that one of Cristofori’s “biggest innovations was creating a hammer mechanism that struck the strings on a keyboard to create sound. The use of a hammer made it possible to produce softer or louder sounds depending upon how light or hard a player pressed on the keys”.

It added: “Being able to change the volume was a major breakthrough. And that’s exactly what doodler Leon Hong wanted to highlight in this interactive doodle.”

Cristofori’s entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that little is known of his life and that his invention was not well known in his lifetime, even if it has since become ubiquitous.

It reads: “Cristofori apparently invented the piano around 1709, and, according to contemporary sources, four of his pianos existed in 1711.”

On the blog dedicated to its doodles, Google wrote that one of Cristofori’s “biggest innovations was creating a hammer mechanism that struck the strings on a keyboard to create sound. The use of a hammer made it possible to produce softer or louder sounds depending upon how light or hard a player pressed on the keys”.
It added: “Being able to change the volume was a major breakthrough. And that’s exactly what doodler Leon Hong wanted to highlight in this interactive doodle.”
Cristofori’s entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that little is known of his life and that his invention was not well known in his lifetime, even if it has since become ubiquitous.
It reads: “Cristofori apparently invented the piano around 1709, and,
according to contemporary sources, four of his pianos existed in 1711.”

With promises of a “revolutionary piano” and its strapline “Sound Beyond Time”, comes the Bogányi piano, named after its creator, the Hungarian pianist Gergely Bogányi. Those incomprehensible claims might bring to mind some wild new mechanism for the production of sound through the digital activation of a piano key: so what is it, a keyboard that lets you produce light as well as sound (like Scriabin wanted) or maybe a set of ivories that turns the piano into a Marty-McFly-style musical DeLorean? Alas, it’s none of the above, in fact: in the flesh – or rather in photographs, since the piano was only unveiled today in Budapest – it looks like a swooshy reinterpretation of the piano form, a bit like a Steinway reimagined by Umberto Boccioni.